Background to research

Loss of motivation is a psychiatric symptom common in neurodegenerative disease and psychiatric conditions such as apathy syndrome and schizophrenia. It has a profound effect on the quality of life of both the patient and their caregiver. Mice can help us understand motivation in more detail, and test potential treatments to improve symptoms.

The standard approach for assessing motivation is to change their normal food or water regime and ask the mice to perform a task outside of their home cage for a food/water reward. However, changing their physiology and environment may impact on their normal behaviour and welfare, making it difficult to interpret results.

Studying behaviour that is more natural to mice in the home cage or in home cage-like environments may produce more translational results.

Studies performed

Reseachers investigated whether mice could perform a similar motivation task in the home cage, without any changes to their feeding schedule. They also tested whether more naturalistic behaviour such as foraging could also be used to measure motivational state, and tested a range of treatments known to improve motivational state to see if the results lined up with more traditional methods.

Research impact

Initial studies show that mice do not need to have their feeding regime changed or leave their home cage to help researchers understand motivated behaviour or explore potential new treatments. In future this research could lead to a new approach for assessing motivation in mice that produces more translational data and refines the mouse’s laboratory lifetime experience.